I used to think I'd marry some white guy, someone from America or the UK. Reason being, I'm not very "Chinese" in my outlook or practices, plus I speak English as a first language. Where I came from, everyone else had a Chinese dialect as their first language. I thought I'd have no chance to enjoy fluent communication with a guy as long as he happened to be Malaysian.

But then I grew up and went out into the Big Bad World. What a revelation! In the city, it's pretty common to find others who similarly speak English as a first language.

And these days I realise that, more than simply speaking the Queen's English, we speak a unique variety of Malaysian English that incorporates words from Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese and Malay. Of course we can also do standard English whenever we want; that's reserved for business situations and more formal occasions. But by and large, it's part of our culture to speak what we call "Manglish" (Malaysian English).

So my friends and I were bringing an American friend around recently and as we chatted with each other, we had to keep on pausing to interpret certain phrases for him. "Wah, you wear so nice ah? I so selekeh only!" Hmmm. How to explain selekeh?

After that incident, I think I might marry a Malaysian guy after all. It's so nice to be able to chat and know that he's going to understand exactly what you're saying and where you're coming from. It'll be great having that shared culture between the two of us. To be able to use all those borrowed words from the languages spoken here and not need to stop and think whether he'll get what you're talking about.

Also, there's a much higher probability that he'll actually love DURIAN!!! *slurp*

I read somewhere that the relationship between words and their meanings are arbitrary. We learn that a chair is called a chair and a table is called a table... but when we come down to it, why is a chair called a chair? Why not call it a glip? Or a wubbie?

Of course, you can always dig into history and find out how the word originated; rhinoceros is from the Greek words rhis (nose) + keras (horn). There, that makes sense, right? The animal with a horn on its nose. But how did a nose come to be a nose and a horn come to be a horn? We know that nose is from the Old English nosu and that, in turn, came from some Germanic language. Still, that hardly explains why a nose is a nose. It only serves to explain how the word has evolved over the years.

Hunter Diack (Language for Teaching, 1966) points out that because of this, "most of the words in a language have to be learnted as separate units". When you're a child, you learn that the colour blue is blue, and yellow is yellow. You learn what happy looks like and sad looks like. You learn that fire is hot and ice-cream is cold. And so on, so forth -- you learn words as separate units.

Why? Because even when words happen to refer to things within the same category, they often take on such different forms that you can't find any logical connection between the two. We have, for example, river and stream, which both refer to things that are very similar. But the words are totally different. You'd never think that they were related. If you knew what a river is, you wouldn't be able to deduce from there that a stream is a "small, narrow river" (as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary).

Diack therefore concludes:

...language is untidy; it is not cut and trimmed and designed for efficiency.

Sometime last week the government (specifically, the Internal Security Ministry) released the titles of 37 banned books. This is not new; they do this from time to time, announcing, "These are the books you're not supposed to read." I suppose they haven't heard that prohibiting somebody from doing something inevitably creates an instant curiosity and desire in that person to do that very thing.

What's fascinating, however, is that the books banned all contain information, stories or discussion on the Muslim faith. Dr Alex Tang has the original news article:

He [Secretary of the Publications and Quranic Texts Control Division Che Din Yusoh] said the prohibition order was imposed on the publications because their contents and text on Islam twisted facts and true Islamic teachings or contained elements that misled the faithful and humiliated the prophets. "These publications can cause confusion and apprehension among Muslims and eventually jeopardise public order," he added.

Irene, the government doesn't want anyone to read about other brands of Islam other than the government-sanctioned -- and therefore "true" -- version of Islam.

Too many versions of one religion makes people think (the government calls this state of mind "confused"). And when people start thinking, the government is put into danger.

It's kinda worrying when a government starts saying, "You must believe what I tell you to believe, and nothing else." And since the government is advocating Islam Hadhari (Civilisational Islam), which, according to the Prime Minister is supposed to "promote tolerance and understanding, moderation and peace, and freedom and justice for all" and "abhors inequities, oppression, extremism and violence", then why do we still have people waving keris (traditional Malay daggers) at political events and threatening to run amok among the non-Malays?

As a non-Malay and non-Muslim, I can't help but conclude that either:

1. the brainwashing -- *ahem*, I mean, educating -- is not working despite efforts to only let them read the "right" books, or
2. Islam Hadhari doesn't actually espouse all those wonderful-sounding ideals. Meaning that all that talk is just camouflage, you know.

When it comes to the divide between the arts & humanities and the sciences, I confess I've always placed language squarely on the arts & humanities side. I've never thought it could remotely be related to science; and even though I knew that linguistics is defined as "the scientific study of language and its structure" (Oxford Engish Dictionary), I didn't see that as a science, either.

But RH Robins suggests in his book General Linguistics: An Introductory Survey that linguistics could actually be the bridge that connects the two branches.

Because, come to think of it, science can't do without language. It needs to use language in order to talk about its subject, to theorise and experiment and explain. In fact, all branches of knowledge need language in order to explain themselves; therefore, Robins says, "Linguistics may, in some respects, be said to lie at the centre of them all, as being the study of the tool they must use."

Interesting, isn't it? And it gets more interesting yet. Robins points out that since linguistics is the study of language, it both uses language and has language as its subject-matter. Ironic when you think that we're trying to use language to describe language. Then I realised after reading Hunter Diack (Language for Teaching) that teachers face a very similar situation:

The teacher of young children has the problem of using words to communicate facts and ideas to children who are often without previous experience of the things, the facts and ideas the words are connected with, or of the words themselves. Teachers also have to use words when teaching their pupils how to use words.

I am having fun with The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers. Let me give you a peek into his world:

It has been wisely said that the adjective is the enemy of the noun. If we make a habit of saying 'The true facts are these', we shall come under suspicion when we profess to tell merely 'the facts'. If a crisis is always acute and an emergency always grave, what is left for those words to do by themselves? If active constantly accompanies consideration, we shall think we are being fobbed off when we are promised bare consideration. If a decision is always qualified by definite, a decision by itself becomes a poor filleted thing. If conditions are customarily described as prerequisite or essential, we shall doubt whether a condition without an adjective is really a condition at all. An unfilled vacancy may leave us wondering whether a mere vacancy is really vacant. If a part is always an integral part or a component part there is nothing left for a mere part except to be a spare part.

Puzzles, much like classroom lessons, must be stimulating and challenging -- but not too difficult, or they will cross the line from "challenging" to "daunting".

It's a delicate balance. One of the theories of how we learn (or acquire) language says that the learner must keep receiving input that is one step above his current language level. Stephen Krashen -- whose theory it is -- explains that the learner will then employ what he knows about the way the language is used and the forms of the language (eg. sentence structures, grammar, etc.) in order to understand this input. In the process he will acquire new knowledge of the language.

So I like doing word puzzles that stretch me just a little, but not too much. I suppose you could say their difficulty level should be just one step above my abilities and knowledge; otherwise they become too much work.

I was tackling a crossword puzzle the other day and asked my housemate to help me brainstorm. "One to whom cheque made out. Five letters," I called out.

"Lucky," she replied.

There's a certain nostalgia that goes together with reading the papers, especially when it comes to a particular annual event that I covered three years in a row. I can picture the scene, the frantic rushing all over the place to get things done, the interviews with all parties concerned... the unimaginative answers I would get year after year.

Some things are wonderfully predictable.

It's this very predictability that gives one the impression of being stuck in a rut, yet engenders a sense of homecoming. The familiar can be comforting, no matter how boring and routine it seems to be.

People ask me whether I miss journalism; my answer is yes and no. I don't in actual fact miss the job itself. It's what comes with the job that I miss most, especially the semi-flexible hours and the relative autonomy.

It was my first "real" job, journalism was, and when I left, my biggest worry was that I wouldn't be able to adjust to a 9-to-5 job which required me to sit at a desk the whole day. In hindsight, there were other things which journalism didn't prepare me for: bosses who want to know exactly what you are doing all the time and watch you like a hawk, and bosses who micromanage and keep on interrupting your work to make sure you're doing it the way they want you to do it.

My boss at the paper used to throw me a topic or a specific person to be interviewed (usually a celebrity of some sort), and expected me to do my research, prepare my questions, arrange the interview, and deliver the article on time. Apart from the deadline, which was of course given to me, it was always up to me to pace my work and manage my own time. I'd never had bosses breathing down my neck for status updates unless the article was late.

That's what I mean by "relative autonomy".

I suppose it's funny that I don't miss journalism -- that I don't miss the writing. Well, I always found writing for the paper very different from writing in general. The style's different, your reason for writing is different, the effect you're trying to achieve is different. Sometimes it was a bit stifling. At other times, it was challenging and stimulating. Most of the time fun, since I got to meet a lot of different people and hear their stories.

The most difficult part, I think, was finding people willing to tell me their stories, especially when it came to sensitive issues. I'd be doing an article on, say, unwed teenage mothers, and hunting high and low for people willing to come forward with their stories. It was tough. Many people don't trust the press. Others just don't want the publicity -- even when we tell them we're prepared to keep our sources anonymous. I hated that part the most, because without the stories, I wouldn't have a compelling article. In fact, I'd have no article. This was the part that always made me sweat. I definitely don't miss that!

When you speak on the phone, do you still say "Hello"?

Now that almost everyone has a mobile phone with caller ID, I find that many tend to do away with the pleasantries. I've answered a call countless times only to have the person on the other end of the line immediately launch into the reason they're calling me. No warning.

The caller expects you to know who he is because he assumes you have saved his number in your address book, which will cause his name to appear on the screen when he calls; and he also expects you to be the one answering the phone because it is, after all, your personal mobile number. So you pick up the phone, and have barely gotten the "Hello" out when he starts in about whatever it is he needs from you.

On the other hand, the good thing about knowing who is calling is that instead of the uncertain, questioning "Hello", I can offer a more personal greeting. Either I say, "Hello, John," for example, or I can say "Hi babe" to a close girl friend or "Hey dude" to a good guy friend (which I do).

Technology is changing the way we communicate and the way we use language. Perhaps it's also made us a bit more impatient, as things now move so quickly and connections are near-instant. What would be considered a breach of phone etiquette and bad manners now seems to be widely tolerated, if not accepted. It will be interesting to see if one day, we completely stop saying "Hello".